This increase in sales will come about due to the emergence of 244 million middle class customers in the Brazil, Russia, India, China and Mexico, who will have a spending power equivalent to their American brethren. Apple will only have to continue doing what it is doing. The power of demographics!

However, Apple does not seem to be a company that will be happy with status quo. If past trends continue, one can expect Apple to make a radical play for a new market. The low-end iPhone may be Apple’s stab at the real El Dorado – the emerging middle classes who do NOT have rich world spending power and lower-income residents of Apple’s main markets. In the next 3 years, 400 million people are expected to buy cellphones in India alone. If Apple can get a large chunk of these consumers onto its ecosystem, the future cross-sell and up-sell opportunities will be immense. There lie considerable riches at the bottom of the pyramid.

Moral of the story – The Exploitation of existing certainties has a potential $68 billion upside, but this pales in comparison to the potential of the Exploration of new opportunities. An ambidextrous approach could see Apple revenues grow many fold!